Category archive: Video

Here. Goodness knows what will happen to that link in future hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenia. But as of now it is working very nicely, and Surrey are having a great day. Foakes has just hit four fours off four balls.

With its own built in commentary from Churchy and his pals, it still isn’t what you get from Sky or from national BBC, but it’s still good. The main drawback is there’s only two cameras, one at each end. It they hit a boundary, you just have to take their word for it about where it went and how fast. But this sort of thing can only get better. Hope it’s still happening tomorrow.

Scorecard of the game here. Close of play day one: Surrey 398-3. Sanga 85, Foakes 64. Nice.

Ex-Surrey batters Davies and Sibley have also been in the runs, for Somerset and for Warks. Also nice.

Off out very soon for dinner with friends, so that’s it here for today, and it makes my evening a lot better now that my duties here are done. Have a good one yourself, unless you are a Yorkshire supporter.

This kind of echoes my guess, several years ago now, that robot lorries are a better immediate bet than robot cars, because lorries do lots of quantifiable work to which only slight improvements will make a big difference, and because motorways are highly controlled places. Ships do lots of quantifiable work, and the sea is also, nowadays (after centuries of it being the ultimate arena of anarchy), a highly controlled place.

Although you just know, from that “try to”, that (although you never know (and I actually don’t know at all)) they won’t. But, they’ll learn lots of little stuff. Most tech seems to be the gradual accumulation of relatively small improvements, which, when they add them up, as they do from time to time, over time, add up to one of those revolutions.

Such as all the revolutions which are now happening or which are about to happen because:

This is an article which quotes gobs from another article which is behind a paywall, which is helpful and frustrating at the same time. I have no problem with people charging for internet stuff, but there is not a lot of point in linking to it from a blog.

But the basic message is that the plunge in the price of energy that the Americans have recently contrived didn’t just happen because of the Big Thing that is fracking. It also consisted, and continues to consist, of lots of smaller innovations, of the sort that those electric airplane guys will be finding out while failing to revolutionise electric airplanes, and then passing on to their fellow techies.

Quote:

There are three trends driving the new energy revolution: smarter management of complex systems, more sophisticated data analytics, and automation. The first trend has allowed companies to become much more efficient while drilling for oil and gas in ever more complex geological environments … Simpler, standardized designs make drilling and production platforms easier to replicate, less expensive, and less likely to suffer costly delays and over-runs in construction. […]

Oil companies … have begun to use complex algorithms to analyze massive amounts of data, making it easier for them to find oil and gas and to manage production … The industry has also begun to use data analytics for “predictive maintenance,” reducing unplanned downtime by analyzing historical data to predict equipment failures before they happen. […]

Soon, intelligent automated systems will enable remote drilling, controlled almost entirely by a handful of high-tech workers in onshore data rooms hundreds of miles away … In the future, automation, along with better data analytics, will make it easier to manage the variation in supplies that comes from using renewable sources such as wind and solar energy and more complex, decentralized grids. It can also make the grid more reliable.

That being from the stuff behind the paywall, quoted at the other end of the above link.

Several years ago now, I had a Last Friday talk saying pretty much exactly this. This talk happened just after the price of energy had halved, but before most of the rest of the world had realised.

There are, as always, a lot or things wrong with the world just now. But stagnant technology is not one of these things.

I have not yet read and probably never will read James Damore’s internal memo that went external, about diversity policies within Google, the one that got him fired. But just in case I do want to read it, here is the full text.

And here is a conversation between James Darmore and Jordan Peterson. I haven’t watched all this either, but so far Peterson has been doing a lot of the talking. But the fact that Damore doesn’t mouth off a lot actually reinforces the feeling that he’s a good guy, if somewhat naïve.

Samizdata has also had a lot of Google/Damore posts recently, here, here (lots of good stuff and links to good stuff in that one), here, here, and here.

Damore was naive, in particular, about what will get you fired. Most people know that if you criticise your bosses and it gets out, they do not like it. The better you do it and the more it gets out, the more they do not like it. Damore did it pretty well and it got out a lot.

Normally, I’d say that Google wanting only employees with “googliness”, of whom Damore proved himself not to be one, would be reasonable. But the trouble is, Google is in the business of making judgements about what opinions should and should not be allowed on the internet, encouraged, discouraged, and so on. For that job, they need political diversity. Unless, of course, they’ve decided to ignore the other half of America.

Which might make sense. That other half of America is, in global terms, a rather unusual bunch of people. As are the “other halfs” of all other countries. The “cosmopolitans” of the world, insofar as they really are a single group, are the biggest and, crucially, the richest group of people in the world. But what if actually, the two halves of America, and the two halves of everywhere else, each have more in common with one another than they do with all the other cosmopolitans? Stay, as the saying goes, tuned.

My own hunch is that Google ignoring half of America will be bad for business. I mean, even the cosmopolitan Americans will want, from time to time, to actually pay attention to the other half, to find out about how, for instance, the other half votes and might be persuaded to vote differently. If Google’s googliness gradually stops helping them do that …?

My quest for a new computer screen, alluded to here some days ago, lasted rather longer than I thought it would. But at least I got a Samizdata posting out of it all.

I also finally managed to finish and submit a short summary of this talk by Marc Sidwell, which I will inform you of again when it is posted. This talk happened nearly a year ago. I personally did not take this long to summarise it, but I did take a few weeks longer than I had hoped. And, I fear, promised.

Yesterday, I was outside Kings Cross Station, and while there I tried to photo one of London’s more amusing little buildings, which looks like a lighthouse.

The camera I have had for the last three years still works, after a fashion. But it is misbehaving, in ways that cause me to miss crucial photos. So, I treated myself to a new one, which is very fine, but very complicated to operate. Which partly explains why, instead taking a still photo of this lighthouse building, I made a movie which merely included the lighthouse building, lasting twenty one seconds, by mistake.

Here is a screen capture from that movie, paused at a moment that makes it look a lot better than it mostly was:

This short movie also contained pictures of passers-b at crazy angles, of the pavement in front of me, along with occasional snatches of my bright blue bag. (I’d happily show the whole thing, but as of right now, I don’t know how that works.)

But, the interesting thing was that there was also a soundtrack. So, it was a real movie, rather than a silent movie. You can hear those passers-by shouting, in some cases with their lips moving in perfect time with their shouting.

Hollywood, be very afraid. Because, perhaps I will try repeating this, while pointing my new camera back at me (for which the twiddly screen (it has a twiddly screen (all my cameras have twiddly screens)) will be very handy), and with me saying something coherent. Or maybe someone else cleverer than me. Or both. Or more. But, I promise nothing.

The lighthouse building is in the middle of the above screen capture, and in the distance (this kind of situation being why I do love a zoom lens). More about this building, and in particular about its recent renovation, here.

Now that TV screens for advertising are becoming ubiquitous at tube stations, seemingly costing hardly any more than paper of the same size (changed by hand from time to time), why not have TV screens at tube stations with .gifs like this on show? Maybe you could have buttons on them, so individual viewers could switch from one to the other in their own time? Would this cause arguments between rival viewers? Revised suggestion: Have three displays on one screen: on the left, real distances; .gif in the middle; “designed” on the right.